Updates & Acquisitions

July 29, 2026

The last month has seen me turning my focus on other things in my life, like getting organized, trimming away things that I don't immediately need, working out plans to erase some of the extraneous furniture. In between it all, I've been trying to find more interesting things to tell you all about in regards to Golf Games. This update doesn't contain an awful lot, by volume, but I'm damned well going to try to stretch it for information as much as I can.

There is a reason why there are potato chips in this photograph.

The wonderful bunch of people over at the Video Game History Foundation's patron discord (consider joining their Patreon by the way! There's a Golfshrine channel!) got on to the subject of Canadian institutions one sunny afternoon. Beyond the traditional utterances of "Tim Horton's isn't that good, we promise," the subject steered towards All-Dressed Chips. If you haven't heard of them, they're sort of the "everything bagel" of the potato chip world; every chip is flavored with barbecue, salt and vinegar, and sour cream and onion, all at once. The result kind of tastes more of barbecue than anything else, to me, but for whatever reason they're a Canadian favorite that just hadn't taken off outside the country until fairly recently. So, it is once again thanks to real life Canadian and recurring Golfshrine contributor, Adam Hartling, that this update has a slice of the great white North in it. Adam didn't send me these chips; I bought them myself for the photo op (and have eaten all of them by now). But he did send me item number one of this lot: the Canadian Multimedia Golf Source CD-ROM, a multimedia tour and utility disc for avid golfers looking to experience Canada.

The other item here comes from a local (but very slightly less local) used game shop; I discovered a complete-in-box Sega Genesis version of World Class Leader Board Golf in their half-off case. This would be a Tiertex-developed adaptation of Access Software's pre-Links smash hit, and the very last contemporary release of the Leader Board line. It has its own unique traits, too, like an entirely new UI, featuring an overhead panel view of the course that is constantly on screen, and dynamically zooms in and out as the ball is in flight.

World Class Leader Board, on Commodore 64, MS-DOS, Game Gear, and Genesis. Screenshots from MobyGames.

Though also interesting to me about this version is the ways it borrows from the then-new successor to Leader Board, by using the photo-captured golfer from Links: The Challenge of Golf:

The last item, which did not make it into the above group shot because I waited nearly a month to decide I wanted to buy it, comes from eBay, and simultaneously, the distant year of 1994.

The world of Shareware is a thing I always had a lot of optimism and nostalgia for. Self-perpetuating software, distributed for free, that encouraged its users to copy and share it with their friends and acquaintances, in the hopes that at least one of them would send a money-order to the authors for a newer version with more things (and fewer nag-screens). I had always found it strange that, despite the PC golf sim market being quite packed throughout the 1990s, there were relatively few shareware golf simulators. Off-hand, I only knew about Caddie Hack as a full-fat Simulator, and the whimsical Fuzzy's World of Miniature Space Golf. A random trip to eBay searching for "golf floppy" led me to understand a third title, and in so doing, brought me around the corner to a company I'd been hoping to put together more of a mental timeline about.

A nondescript grey floppy disk graces my desk.

The identity of this disk was in question. Ultimate Challenge Golf did not immediately ring a bell; I was aware of the seemingly unrelated Greg Norman's Ultimate Golf Challenge, but knew that had only ever been released as a CD-ROM. A contact on Bluesky told me about another game by this title that did release on floppies, but I was skeptical. Why did the disk say it was in 3D, when the box screenshots are all of overhead maps? Why was this seemingly a shareware release when the game itself seemed to be a retail box? All I could do was buy that disk.

Identity confirmed.

Upon receiving the disk and putting it through my usual rigorous imaging and testing procedures, I set about documenting its contents. The game in question is definitely a copy of Ultimate Challenge Golf, in its shareware incarnation (version S2.0), as produced by the Friendly Software Corporation. It turns out that UCG was both a shareware and a retail release, with some perks specific to each release. Registered users would have access to at least one unique course not available at retail, while retail customers would have a nice box, manual, and multiple disk formats. Most interesting to me is an unusual promotion: the course included with the free shareware version (what's on this disk, by a shareware distributor) is dubbed "Mystery Course." Upon selecting it, the game displays a message that, should you correctly guess what real-world course the Mystery Course represents, Friendly Software would offer a free upgrade to a newer version of UCG upon its release. The Mystery Course is also not available as a retail add-on. I have not looked up whether the Mystery Course was ever identified, or whether the add-on courses have been preserved in any meaningful way.

Ultimate Challenge Golf in "Links-like" 3D mode, and low-memory 2D mode. And Greg Norman's game for comparison.

The Friendly Software Corporation is a company I've been curious about for a couple of years; a handful of other titles of theirs have entered Golfshrine's inventory over time, from Greg Norman's game to Microsoft Golf 1998's Eddie Bauer Special Edition, and bargain-bin title World Tours II Golf for VALUSoft. Somewhere down the line, they rebranded themselves to aboutGolf, Ltd. and produced previous Golfshrine highlight, Loyal H. "Bud" Chapman's Infamous 18, before pivoting into developing software for indoor golf simulator suites. With this shareware disk, I've obtained what I believe is the beginning of the Friendly Software timeline, with only a couple of holes remaining to be filled. (A copy of the retail version of UCG among them... eventually. When I'm rich again.)

Do Some News For Me

A mild bout of self-promotion

For non-golf-related things (yes, I do write about those sometimes!), earlier this month I finally released a blog article about 1996's Prime Target, a Macintosh-exclusive FPS game running on Bungie's Marathon 2 engine, that I find fascinating precisely because it isn't that interesting at all.

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